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IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

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Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#71

Post by chromatin »

snarf21 wrote: post #50
saxonww wrote: post #14

I really expected that we'd see a change in my lifetime, that GPs in particular would be replaced by a lower-cost Watson descendant, with there being some other role for patient interaction, wet work, and data entry (perhaps just nurses). My mom worked for a GP for about 20 years, and it seemed to me that most of what made that guy a doctor was bedside manner + being able to remember a lot of things. But GPs often ma…

There is no need to market to Doctors now when they market directly to consumers who go demand they get the new medicine. If we want to reduce costs, we need to move to lower level providers like a LPN or CRNP. Most people coming into a GP have the flu or an ear infection or .... and that can be handled by them. There will be one MD and to handle complicated cases and to supervise. We've already switched so that inta…

> In the US at least working at FAANG pays far more than being a GP.

Not just FAANG, either.

The assertion by grandparent poster that GPs are "astoundingly" well paid is bonkers.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#72

Post by jjcon »

cnlwsu wrote: post #35
cube00 wrote: post #26

It will be interesting to see if self driving cars and the way they've been rushed to market with the same brute force marketing will meet a similar fate.

Self driving cars are not made by IBM. I wouldn’t consider their utter failure at everything they touch to be a sign that that AI field failed.

Agreed, AI is just like any software. There are good, bad, scammy and brilliant examples of it. With AI somehow though people like to use one bad example as a referendum on everything.

I think I understand why (because AI as a term is overloaded by marketing teams), but the inclination is to paint with a broad brush is still inaccurate here.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#74

Post by bobbob1921 »

ferdowsi wrote: post #57
nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

They coast on enterprise lock-in while pretending they are innovative by shoveling money into non-useful blockchain projects.

And MARKETING, ofcourse.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#76

Post by duck_bacon »

thallium205 wrote: post #53
nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

Although small in comparison, they also bought weather underground for a cool billion or so and completely ran it into the ground.

I was part of that acquisition. To be fair, Weather Channel was already running Weather Underground into the ground when they acquired it first. IBM just came in and helped them finished the job.

A huge part of it was the incompetence with which IBM pushed us to use Watson modules in our products, which I could see 6 years ago were worse than open source AI options and had no application to Weather Underground's services. They were basically toy projects being advertised as ground-breaking AI. I'm not surprised at all to see Watson finally collapsing under the weight of its vacuous claims.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#77

Post by gigatexal »

nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

Yeah … My thoughts exactly.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#78

Post by lotsofpulp »

shane_b wrote: post #39
boboche wrote: post #17

IBM is such a shadow of what it used to be. Hopefully newer health+genomic+ai startups or initiatives at less dinosauresques companies will make the next leap happen in our lifetime.

Currently they have one of the only if not the only enterprise permissioned blockchain project called fabric and it’s open source. I could see them making a comeback with crypto but not the way we think about it today. Instead, inter-enterprise operations infrastructure.

Based on their lack of competitive pay, I assume IBM does or will end up competing with TCS, Cognizant, Infosys, etc.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#79

Post by lokar »

jeremyjh wrote: post #60
nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

I think they still make a lot of money from their legacy business, z/OS & mainframes, DB/2 etc still run basically all large banks, insurance companies and many other types of businesses. IBM can charge whatever they want for the hardware and services to support these things because their customers have no alternative. So they have just been farming this for decades, and can afford not to succeed at anything else (so…

They also run th backed for major airline booking systems, and charge outrageous amounts.

Re: IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts

#80

Post by blip54321 »

nickysielicki wrote: post #48

I do not understand how IBM stays in business. As far as I’m concerned the only cool engineering thing IBM does anymore is POWER, which has a sort of unique memory architecture but otherwise is well behind everyone else. What else did they do in my lifetime? They took a profitable RedHat and gutted it, they took the best Laptop line and sold it to Lenovo and almost ruined it, they tried to be a front runner in ML but…

I was surprised by some companies too, until I worked outside of tech.

The whole rest of the universe needs software too. Most companies are grossly incompetent to develop it themselves. Most are things that SWEs of the type which visit HN would never, ever want to work on. IBM does that adequately well. That's "services."

If I need a tool built which will manage workflow at a management consulting firm, a custom tool for managing cases at a law firm, or some custom supply chain kludge -- the 99% of other "boring" software -- and I happen to know nothing about technology, who do I turn to?

IBM isn't a bad choice. It's a major step up from Indian firms in terms of both price and quality. It has significant in-house technology to leverage. It's a safe choice. It will usually do better than in-house IT.

I recently evaluated the business of a company which builds ships. They developed software in-house with an IT staff who weren't qualified to tie their own shoelaces. They had huge military contracts. They didn't subcontract to IBM, but it wouldn't have been a bad choice.

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